Flicking the Flickering Images

The daytime hours have been great lately. I wake up focused, usually a half hour or so before the kids. I make my coffee and sit on the back deck, when it's not raining, to drink it with nothing but the melody of nature surrounding me peripherally. When I hear little feet pattering upstairs right around the time I sense their awakening, my mind switches into mommy mode... big hugs and kisses, stroking the messed up hairdos, bartering cereals or breakfast choices with them. We sit down to eat and I tell them what to expect for the day. Then I shower while they watch Blues Clues and we all get dressed for school and work. We are out the door, and spend the ride to school chatting, talking about the low clouds, the buds on the trees, and the types of cars on the road - they love school buses and punch bugs, but when we see an El Camino they both exclaim, "An El Camino mommy! That's your car!" We go into the school and take their coats off and when I give them their good-bye hugs, my heart crumples in a little, and a wave of sadness rolls through me. Once out to the truck, I am sad, but elated with the thought of making Paige laugh one last time before we begin our respective days. I drive slowly past her classroom window, and there she is, standing and looking outside, her forehead to the glass. I roll down the window and cross my eyes and bob my head back and forth. And her laugh, although I cannot hear it, echoes throughout the day.

On the drive back home or to the office, I become the divorcee. It is the only time during every day - approximately 12 minutes - where I allow my thoughts to go over the details of this divorce. The thoughts are sometimes financially oriented, sometimes logistically oriented (kid pick-up times, contents of house exchanges, etc.), but mostly they are emotionally charged - anger, sadness, shock (still!). By the time I've reached an emotional climax, Springsteen is blaring on the I-pod and I am either wiping a way the trickle of a tear or I am pounding the steering wheel from complete giddiness.

After that, work is my focus, and I am balls to the wall into it... spinning off emails, reviewing and writing documents, or taking phone calls. Around late afternoon, I realize that although I have had two pots of coffee to drink, I have yet to eat. But I am suddenly happy because I know that in less than two or so hours, the kids will be back in my life. And I will not lie, I sometimes pick them up very early from school just so I can spend more than two hours with them before dinner, bath and bedtime rituals begin. As soon as they are in the car, I am "mommy" again. My boss once called me at 5:02pm and I told him he'd have to hold his questions for the morning, Carrie was unavailable. The joke went over, but part of me was serious!

By the time the kids are in bed, Mommy is exhausted, and the focus is a big blur. I slip into bed as they are still falling asleep, and I am out.

Two hours later, I wake up in a cold sweat, images of my husband on our wedding day or his left hand sporting his wedding ring jump into my head and I see them clear as day, and my heart starts to pound and I am in complete shock that this is my life now.

I went to my acupuncturist tonight and explained this to her. She worked on me for a while and as soon as I got relaxed, I saw his hand again, the meat of his thumb and it turned and the wedding ring was no longer on his finger but in the palm of his hand, and I was so mad. She walked into the room just as the image faded away and asked how I was doing. I said "I am mad, really mad." But then I started to cry because all this control, all this focus, all this power I feel in my conscious hours falls prey to the workings of my subconscious mind, and the cold sweats, the sweet images, the sneaky images are riding bareback across my mind, causing a great deal of havoc! She worked on me a little more, and after ten more minutes of treatment, I began seeing my fingers flicking the images like boogers from my hands. When one would come in, I flicked and the image fell from my fingertips like droplets of water. After several minutes, I opened the door and let the images come in faster and faster, and I kept flicking - waving good-bye to them, welcoming them so that they no longer had the shock-value. Yet, at the end of the session a random thought entered my head, "I should put our wedding video onto a cd so that we can keep it in better shape." Yeah. You see? What is the point of doing that? To share with the kids? If they want to see it badly enough, they'll find some old out-of-date VCR and play it.

My acupuncturist gave me a sympathetic smile and said the images would probably keeping coming but to just ride with it because they have to be discarded. Then she told me to go to the gym and run it off. And I did. I went to the gym and ran for 35 minutes straight, hard and fast, and when I stepped off the treadmill, the only thought on my mind was contemplating whether I should move toward the workout mats so I would have a softer landing when I passed out. But it worked! I haven't thought of his ring-less finger since.

Damn. I just did.